The Defense Authorization bill is supposed to be an opportunity for Congress to shape national defense priorities and share the responsibility with the president when it comes to foreign policy. Generally the president has significant authority to make his mark on...
With the ongoing larger US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere, it can easily become the "new normal" that US troops are also fighting in (relatively) small numbers in places we just do not hear about, in wars the media does not question, in...
Adding to suspicions of a US role in the ouster of independent-minded Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is a revelation making the rounds today that Michel Temer, the opposition leader who will step in as interim president, had met with US embassy officials in Sau...
"Why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even while absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence?" This is the question asked by Professor Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army...
For the third time in seven months, the US has sent a warship to challenge China in territorial waters it claims in the South China Sea. The US claims its purpose is to keep shipping lanes open, while China arguably benefits as much as anyone from trade going in and...
The recently-released Pentagon report on the US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan last October was heavily redacted, but it still revealed a great deal about the ongoing disaster of the longest war in US history. US troops complain...
In a university commencement speech over the weekend, US Secretary of State John Kerry ridiculed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's plan to build a wall on the Mexican border. He told the students to get ready for a borderless society. He also said that...
US Ambassador to Hungary, Coleen BellIf anyone wants a short course on what's wrong with US diplomacy look no further than US Ambassador to Hungary Coleen Bell's speech Friday to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Hungarian Parliament. In typical diplo-speak there...
This election season is presenting unprecedented challenges to the peace and prosperity coalition that was born in opposition to the traditional Left/Right matrix. Young people have been strongly attracted to Ron Paul's message of keeping the government out of their...
US military in Lahij, YemenCiting the Arab language Al Masirah TV news site, 20th Century Wire is reporting that some 100 US Army Special Forces have landed recently at the Anad air base in Lahij, Yemen. This deployment is said to augment other Arab forces currently...
What is it that keeps the Washington Post's hyperventilating neocon scribbler Jennifer Rubin up at night? The fact that Ron Paul's lifelong efforts to promote a peaceful foreign policy continue to light fires in the imaginations of his fellow Americans. Any chance her...
In 1980 President Carter issued an order requiring males between 18 and 25 to register with Selective Service should a military draft become necessary. It was a response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. At the time women were not eligible for the draft...
Just ten years after America was shocked at the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and just a year and a half after the Senate torture report, a recent poll suggests that three-fourths of the population would support torture of terrorism suspects....
Over the weekend a militia supporting Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr breached the "Green Zone" protecting the Iraqi government and foreign embassies in Baghdad. They are protesting ongoing corruption among Iraq's US-backed leaders. Lawmakers fled and a state of emergency...
The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that NATO is preparing to deploy four battalions -- approximately 4,000 troops -- to Russia's western border. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work was in Brussels today to announce the Western military escalation on...
After President Obama swore no fewer than eight times that he would not put boots on the ground in Syria and then did so, his State Department spokesman swore that he never said that he would not put boots on the ground. Why have US government press briefings turned...
It should hardly be surprising to anyone paying attention that the federal government lied about every aspect of its "need" to break into the iPhone of the San Bernardino mass-shooter. There was another way to access it than compelling Apple to write code to defeat...
The total muddle that is US policy toward Syria continues to astonish. This week we saw the spectacle of a State Department Spokesman telling us that President Obama's promise to not put US boots on the ground in Syria, was never a promise not to put boots on the...
Washington war contracts have enriched northern Virginia at a level equal to the total budgets of countries like Belgium and Sweden. That post-9/11 security- and military-industrial complex financial bonanza is why north Virginia counties are the wealthiest in the...
According to the Washington Post, President Obama had promised the US public no fewer than eight times that he would not put US troops on the ground in Syria and would not mount ground operations in Syria. Then the pretext of a rescue operation of the Yazidi minority...
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